The educated youth of the mid-19th century were traumatized by the aftereffects of the twin revolutions that convulsed Europe around 1800: the French Revolution with its 30 years of war and upheaval; and the Industrial Revolution in the economy.
Everything was changing, and Merker proposes “Romanticism in art and intellectual fashions” as, at least in part, a reaction against the merciless change issuing from the French and Industrial Revolutions. And this Romanticism included Nationalism, an effort to create meaning in national myths for the various peoples of Europe.
The point is that we live in a time of momentous change.
[We have] the French and Industrial Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, Romanticism, Nationalism, science, and beyond[.]
And everyone is trying to understand the present, to divine the future, and also make their divination happen.
What’s it all about, Alfie? One thing is clear. In the two and a half centuries since the convulsions centering around the year 1800, we still have not agreed upon what to do. We have been unable to stabilize our Enlightenment heritage as divided between the competing French and English interpretations.
So Merker proposes to investigate the “superordinate ideals and values” that are directing traffic. And he suggests that Romanticism, especially as it helped birth Marxism, is the key to understanding what ails us. A key to the birth of Marxism in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, except that they were not really philosophers but literary figures creating modern myths.
These three failed to be bound by Kant’s dictum that we cannot know things in themselves, and pretended that they could know everything by conducting speculative exercises in “German Philosophical Romanticism.”
But there was a problem. Hegel’s philosophy proposed an “end of history” culminating in the “glorification of the Prussian state” and did not provide a secular version of Christianity that looked towards the future and provided an engine of “hope, purpose, and activism directed at a ‘promised’ future state of felicity.”
No problem. David Friedrich Strauss wrote The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach wrote The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach proposed that the notion of God is a projection of positive human attributes “such as understanding, strength and love” into a divine being that is really just a projection of ideal human nature.
According to Feuerbach, in our conception of God we have divested ourselves of our own nature in an act of self-alienation that leaves us estranged from ourselves and divided from our fellow humans.
Suppose there were other, non-religious alienations “whose abolition would complete the liberative restoration of an imagined human state of perfection”. Moses Hess came out with On the Essence of Money that experienced humans as subjects “under the ‘worship of money’” as a secular equivalent to Feuerbach’s religious alienation.
Obviously, this secular alienation could be “ended by a restoration, under a future system of socialism or communism, of the cooperation which Hess held to be characteristic of human productivity in the unalienated state”.
Marx and Engels converted this restoration into their “materialist conception of history” where human history is driven by “changes in the material means of production.” Thus the Industrial Revolution changed the means of production and the bourgeois revolutions would be followed by proletarian revolution, and “the cataclysm would issue in a world of conflictless cooperation”, for, following Feuerbach, it would release the
cooperative, unselfish, communal species-being [that] constitutes the real nature of the individual awaiting liberation from its occlusion by “alienated labor”[.]
The genius of Marxism is to copy the Christian arc of history into secular form.
By its assumption of an inevitable passage from capitalism to revolution Marxism recaptured, in purely secular terms, … the psychology of hope and purpose that is inherent in Christian sacred history[.]
And it equips the followers with patience, for if the revolution doesn’t succeed today it just means that “material conditions are not sufficiently ‘ripe’ for the passage to the final apocalyptic transformation.” Meanwhile the faithful can keep busy with “the proselytizing, organizing, and agitation that will inevitably… be rewarded with success in the end by ‘the iron laws of history’”, never mind the “defeats along the way to the shimmering goal.”
More to come.